DeSoto's Florida Trails
by Donald E. SheppardThe horses were finally disembarked with the other livestock onto Cape Haze (Elvas and Rangel in Clayton 1993:I:57, 254). On the night of May 30th, 1539 (on the high tides of Full Moon, as we now realize), DeSoto's guards sailed up to the head of the harbor and Ucita was taken in a dawn raid (ibid.; DeSoto in Clayton:I:375). The Indians, having been aware of the ships for nearly a week, had fled, much to DeSoto's disappointment. His style of capturing the chief and enslaving the citizens had been thwarted by delay. Hostages were not to be taken en masse from Ucita, setting off a series of mishaps which would disrupt the campaign for months. Without forced labor, the men would have to perform all the menial tasks associated with landing and carrying supplies overland on their departure, and the transport captains would get but few captives to take with them (Rangel in Clayton:I:258).
The next day, on the Spring Tides, the fleet sailed up the harbor to within a mile of Locust Point, the closest mainland to the channel at the head of the bay, where the men were disembarked (ibid.:254; DeSoto: ibid.). They made their way through the marshes toward the village of Ucita, two leagues from where they landed (Elvas in Clayton:I:57; Inca in Clayton:II:101). In the meantime, the horsemen driving the livestock made their way toward Ucita, a twelve league trip (Rangel in Clayton:I:254), as it is today around the cape's swamps and over the Myakka River at the head of the harbor. That moonlit trip would be the entire cavalry's longest non-stop "ride" in Florida.
Very late that night, the horsemen finally arrived near Ucita, exhausted from their journey (ibid.). They had trudged through the swamps and over the mouth of the Myakka River, although Spring Tides dramatically shallow that fording place near midnight. They found themselves on the opposite side of Tippecanoe Bay from the men, however, and, exhausted, slept where they were (ibid.), on today's El Jobean. The men, having been misled for hours by Anasco's four captives (ibid.), watched the horsemen's campfires from the opposite bank of Tippecanoe Bay, neither group realizing they were separated by only one league of hard ground. The next day, the horsemen found the passage around the lagoon at the head of the bay and reassembled with the men (ibid.:255). On June third, with all the dignitaries and necessary paraphernalia ashore, DeSoto took formal possession of La Florida.
Ucita, DeSoto's landing site, a Native village at the head of Charlotte Harbor, Florida, can be located using four precise statements by DeSoto's Chroniclers: the first comes from the liberated captive Juan Ortiz; the second, a description of the army's departure from another eye witness; the third, Inca's journal of the Thirty Lancers return to port; and finally, by the army's reported movements in that area by various chroniclers.
Ortiz had been captured by Hirrihigua's people when he disembarked to read a note, but years later he was led away from Ucita, Hirrihigua's village (Inca in Clayton:II:101-107). Ortiz was led to an Indian bridge two leagues (just over five miles) from the village and crossed a river on that bridge (the same bridge used by Narvaez with Cabeza de Vaca). Ortiz then fled six additional leagues to Mococo's Village (ibid.:107), where he spent years before DeSoto's people found him. Biedma (in Clayton:I:226) tells us that when the army departed Ucita, it marched west (to the Myakka River, the only river west of the harbor's head) and then north-west. The army turned north-west just before the Indian bridge to proceed up the river's east bank on "firmer" ground: besides, the bridge was probably too small for DeSoto's army, as it had been for DeSoto's horsemen driving livestock weeks earlier. DeSoto's people reported building a bridge to cross the river further up; the trail would pass by Mococo's Village, eight leagues from Ucita (ibid.:225; Inca in Clayton:II:132).
Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca, with a much smaller army and with no livestock to drive, had crossed the Indian bridge from the opposite direction years before; they had landed at Englewood, less than three leagues south of the bay head at the bridge site (ibid.:101; Vaca in Hodge 1907:20, 21, 25). In fact, the fields on the west bank of the Myakka River, six leagues above the Indian bridge point, were called "Old Spanish Fields" by Florida's pioneers and are labeled as such on John Lee Williams' Map of East Florida of 1827. Those "Old Spanish Fields" were simply DeSoto artifacts strewn about when they departed; Chief Mococo had them collected at his village; Ortiz would report finding Chief Mococo's village two leagues from the seashore (Elvas in Clayton:I:62).
The Thirty Lancers, led by Anasco, returned from north Florida five months after leaving Ucita when DeSoto decided to move his headquarters from Ucita to another harbor more accessible to the continent's interior. The Lancer's journey is related by Inca (in Clayton:II:204-227) with a precision which betrays his noted confusion of place names and total ignorance of provincial boundary. If we simply ignore Inca's speculation of the names of places which the Lancers encountered near mid-journey, however, we can learn a great deal about the Lancers' trip and, thereby, about DeSoto's trail. The Lancers rode for eleven days back down DeSoto's trail and described their daily movements and the obstacles they encountered along the way. On their last night before reaching Ucita they camped three leagues short of Mococo's village and eleven leagues short of Ucita (ibid.:224,227), reinforcing the reported eight-league separation of those villages by Biedma. Just over one league from Ucita, the Lancers feared for the safety of the men left at port when no horse tracks were found in a clearing, but were pleased to find fresh tracks and ash from clothes being washed at a lagoon less than half-a-league from the village (ibid.:226-227).
Recall, too, that the men spent their first night ashore near Ucita, two leagues from where they disembarked. That measure from Locust Point meets the half-league measure from the harbor's only lagoon at a site astride a creek at the northeast end of Tippicanoe Bay (Elvas in Clayton:I:57), just west of today's Murdock. The Myakka River is two leagues from that site, as Ortiz reported. The clearing the Thirty Lancers passed, without horse tracks and lying just over a league from the village, is a large creek bed on El Jobean, not far from where the horsemen camped for the first time in Florida. The fishing enclosure hooks southward into Muddy Cove half-a-league south of Ucita and is clearly distinguishable as such. Hog Island, a canebrake where Hirrihigua's people hid from DeSoto but were later dispersed (Inca in Clayton:II:122; Rangel in Clayton:I:257), is two leagues from Ucita, exactly as described.
Today, Ucita is a residential subdivision with paved roads and man-made canals running through it, seven feet above sea-level but with few homes built on it. That site shows on the original Florida Township survey as dense scrub, several hundred acres of it, in a "third rate pine forest" of ten thousand acres or more (Field Notes of the Township Survey of 1849; Elvas in Clayton:I:58). DeSoto had felled the trees around Ucita to pasture his horses, and the men probably used the logs to build dwellings and storage buildings (ibid.). Scrub oak grew over that area, and no other in that proximity, in the intervening three centuries preceding the Township Survey. Since then the pines have all been harvested or burned over; the entire area is covered with scrub, pine and palmetto today. A creek that flowed through the village has been rerouted, but the bed is still intact for archaeological investigation; its banks are undisturbed. The Myakka River's (English written) name came from Chief Mococo. U-sep-pa Island (again, in English), near the mouth of Charlotte Harbor, was named that by U-cit-a people when they resettled away from DeSoto and closer to their off-shore fishing grounds.
Tippecanoe Bay, with two or three feet of water at low tide today, despite extensive accretion due to upland dredging, accommodated the off-loading of ships near the harbor anchorage by landing craft (Elvas and Rangel in Clayton:I:57, 255). Water depth in the main anchorage at the head of Charlotte Harbor is at least seventeen feet today, as it was on Bernard Romans' Chart of 1774. Likewise, the shallows of the channel south of Cape Haze are clearly shown (12 feet of water at mean tide), accounting for the fact that DeSoto was delayed until Spring Tide on May 31, 1539, to enter the harbor's anchorage. The sand bars at the harbor's entrance are also clearly shown on it, exactly as Rangel described them (in Clayton:I:253); all as they are today. The main anchorage is four leagues from Ucita (ibid.:254) and on a straight line down the Myakka River, making ship's mastheads visible for many leagues up that river, as reported by the scouts who found Ortiz (Inca in Clayton:II:113). Chief Mococo had released Ortiz upon hearing of the Spanish presence. Ortiz had fled down the Myakka River toward Ucita and was spotted by DeSoto's scouts, who thought he and his escorts were hostile natives (ibid.:114; Elvas, Biedma and Rangel in Clayton:I:59, 225, 255). Ortiz could only make the sign of the cross and call out "Xivilla" when approached by the heavily armed scouts (Inca in Clayton:II:115). The scouts shouted with joy and escorted their prize to DeSoto (ibid.:117; Elvas, Biedma and Rangel in Clayton:I:59, 225, 255), but due to his excitement, it took Ortiz some time to remember how to speak his own native language fluently.
To the north and east of Ucita are extensive swamps that livestock could not cross, but the swamps are dried today by drainage canals and the borrow-pits used to build Interstate 75, which traverses them. DeSoto's army would depart Ucita to the west and north-west, across El Jobean over hard ground. Horsemen would drive the livestock. Narváez had probably walked his army northeast from Ucita, expecting to feed his horses and to find the Apalachen gold he had heard about (Vaca in Hodge 1907:21). He would have passed through the marshes of the Peace River then crossed it just before reaching today's Arcadia, where he had found maize growing; all within his ten to twelve league journey (ibid.:22). Narváez had continued north, inland of the Peace River, but had eventually been led by circumstance over the Great Swamp (ibid.:25), the only fording place on a river which flows across all northbound routes from Ucita.. DeSoto's people would report crossing the same swamp, on the same river, at the same place and for the same reason eleven years later, as we shall see.
DeSoto stayed at Ucita for six weeks. He wrote a letter to Cuba (DeSoto in Clayton:I:375), transport vessels were off-loaded and sent on their way, patrols were dispatched, and DeSoto's two brigs were safely secured at anchor. French Corsairs plied the new world waters (Clayton:I:379), so DeSoto left armed sailors on the brigs. When all was settled, DeSoto left at least seventy men and twenty horsemen at port to guard the stores (Elvas and Rangel in Clayton:I:64, 258; Inca in Clayton:II:131). His army could not find captives to carry the stores inland, and DeSoto was kind to Mococo's people. The army herded pigs, instead, so the men could eat when all else failed (Rangel in Clayton:I:259).
DeSoto's army left Ucita on July 15th (New Moon) headed for Ocale Province, where they planned to spend the winter in its "abundance of gold, silver and many pearls", as scouts reported captives had proclaimed (Desoto in Clayton:I:376; Elvas in Clayton:I:64). DeSoto marched west from Ucita, but did not cross the Myakka River on the Indian bridge or attempt to ford the river there, although tides were favorable as we realize today from accurate lunar reports. The horsemen had learned why not to ford it six weeks earlier: the bottom is still black sticky mud today. DeSoto marched up the firm east bank of the river instead, headed north-west. That trail would cross the Myakka River's north-east bend seven leagues from Ucita and a little more than league below Mococo's west bank village. They camped on the river's bank opposite Mococo's Village their first night out (Rangel in Clayton:I:258-259), having traveled about six leagues that day. The trail they took is the only trail shown from Charlotte Harbor on the John Lee Williams Map of Eastern Florida of 1827: it bypasses the massive swamp west of the river's big bend where Ortiz first sighted Mococo's workers just below their village years earlier (Elvas in Clayton:I:61-62). That swamp is drained by Cow Pen Slough today.